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As they say, “Change is the only constant.” Thriving and surviving during a period of extraordinary collision of technological advances, globalization, and climate change can be daunting. At any given point in one’s life, a transition can be interpreted in terms of the magnitude of change (how big or small) and the individual’s ontological experience of change (whether it disrupts an equilibrium or adapts an emergent way of life). These four quadrants represent different ways to live in a highly dynamic and complex world. We share the resulting four-quadrant framework from a quantitative and a mixed methods study to examine responses to various ways we respond to transitions. Contingent upon these two dimensions, one can use a four-quadrant framework to mobilize resources to design a response and hypothesize a desired outcome. Individuals may find themselves at various junctions of these quadrants over a lifespan. These four quadrants provide “requisite variety” to navigate individual ontology as they move into and out of fluid spaces we often call instability during a time of transition. In this chapter, we identified social, cognitive, psychological, and behavioral factors that contribute to thriving transition experiences, embracing dynamic stability. Two new constructs were developed, the first measures the receptivity to change, Transformation Quotient (TQ) and second measures the range of responses to transitions from surviving to thriving, Thriving Transitional Experiences (TTE). We hope our work will pave the way for Thriving to become a “normal” outcome of experiencing change by transforming the lexicon and expectation of engaging with transitions.

Purpose of This Chapter: This study examines the relationship of ambidextrous leadership with employee voice behaviour, underscoring the intervening role of employee thriving.

Design / Methodology / Approach: This study proposes a conceptual framework based on an extensive literature review using the conservation of resource theory, social exchange theory, and the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

Findings: This study demonstrates that employee thriving act as an underlying mechanism explaining the relationship between ambidextrous leadership and employee voice behaviour.

Research Limitations: Being a conceptual study, the proposed framework lacks empirical validation.

Practical Implications: Organizations should focus on leaders with flexible behaviours who understand situational necessities to adopt diverse leadership styles and contribute to employee thriving.

Originality: This is one of the first studies to propose the role of ambidextrous leadership in impacting and enhancing change in employee voice through employee thriving at work. By introducing a framework that delves into the unexplored territory of ambidextrous leadership, acting as a catalyst for enhancing employee voice via the lens of employee thriving. This study provides a fresh perspective and adds value to the evolving conversations around employee voice behaviour.

This empirical investigation studies the correlates and predictors of employees’ psychological outcomes during mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the context of India. This study examined the role of different types of training initiatives (awareness training, human capital development training, and cross-cultural training) on building employees feeling of psychological empowerment and thriving. Further, second-order attitudes were studied in the form of employee satisfaction and commitment. A cross-sectional research design was adopted where quantitative and qualitative data were collected to investigate the interplay between the variables. Data were collected on an adapted standardized questionnaire from the employees of a public sector organization (N = 117) which had merged with a software company to deliver its IT services. Descriptive analysis, multiple correlational analysis, and stepwise regression analysis have assisted in exploring the different relationships amongst the variables. This study produces a prescriptive framework for merger success based on the model of growth and thriving (Spreitzer & Porath, 2012). Broadly, the results point towards the facilitative role of training in developing feelings of psychological empowerment, thriving, commitment and satisfaction with the merger, however qualitative data identified significant cultural undercurrents.

The environment in which businesses operate today is uncertain, chaotic, and changing at a more rapid pace than ever before. In this new dynamic world, current approaches to organizational design and processes are not as effective as they have been. Recent research has provided insight into organizational agility as a method to help organizations survive and thrive in these environments. A divergent body of literature is presented that explores agility, learning, and thriving. An exploratory mixed-methods study was conducted at the team level to examine the relationship between these constructs as well as their relationship to performance. Based on the results, we present a series of propositions for future research and provide an illustration of the Components of Agile and Thriving teams to be used as its foundation. The discussion serves to synthesize these initial findings and provide both implications for practice as well as theory.

Organizational agility is becoming a critical component of organization development and change due to the increasingly continuous and iterative nature of change. This explanatory mixed methods study demonstrates the effect of collective thriving on change agility and positions collective thriving as a psychological state that contributes to organization agility. Attunement is hypothesized to be a point of leverage to increase the state of collective thriving and was found to moderate the relationship between collective thriving and change agility. The qualitative study investigates characteristics of high- and low-thriving teams and furthers the understanding of collective thriving and change agility.

With increasingly precarious work contracts, more remote work, and additional flexibility in the timing of the workday, the new world of work is creating both relational opportunities and relational challenges for modern workers. In this chapter, we pair recent research on human thriving with trends we observe in organizations' efforts to create and maintain a sense of community. Key in these efforts is a new kind of built environment – the coworking space – which brings together remote and independent workers and, increasingly, traditional employees as well. We show that in curating community, or perhaps even the possibility of community, coworking spaces may support the interpersonal learning and vitality that help workers to thrive.

Setbacks and failures are part of organizational life. While a recent body of literature pointed to the importance of recovery, resilience, and learning from failure in responding to and dealing with setback events, the setback itself and its underlying dimensions remain underexplored. However, how severe employees perceive a setback to be plays an integral role in how successfully they handle these events. Taking an event-oriented perspective on work-related setbacks, this study defines setback severity as the setback event’s novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality. Based on the current literature and prior operationalizations, the authors introduce and validate a three-dimensional measure of setback severity. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provide support for the proposed three-dimensional model. Further analyses show that disruptiveness and criticality are significantly related to identity threat, emotional exhaustion, trauma, turnover intention, and thriving, while novelty is only related to turnover intention and thriving. The implications of the setback severity measure are discussed along with recommendations for future research.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the student mental health crisis in Higher Education (HE), and how resilience and grit, two important positive psychological constructs, can be beneficial for university students’ success and wellbeing. As part of a discussion around some of the current approaches to intervening in wellbeing in universities, the chapter provides evidence for the use of PPIs for wellbeing in university students, alongside some of the challenges of implementing these in HE. It also provides an overview of the Thriving Students Framework and presents a case for a multicomponent approach to monitoring and improving educational success. In particular, a wellbeing framework that, alongside resilience, also recognises the importance of strengths, persistence in the face of difficulty, a growth mindset, self-control and mental wellbeing; Academic Tenacity. The implications of utilising this framework for educational attainment in university students are discussed. The Bolton Uni-Stride Scale (BUSS), a single short measure of academic tenacity that combines the attributes enabling measurement and intervention to support university students to thrive, is also presented for educators to use.

For many centuries, women academics have thrived regardless of the system, the rules, as well as the challenges and barriers in academia. Drawing on a rich array of research literature on leadership, management, and gender studies, and illuminated through semi-true biographies of academics, this chapter provides a strengths-based perspective that can help empower women academics to thrive in academia.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.